July 23, 2010

Of all the American silent film comics, Harold Lloyd — wide eyes framed by black horn-rims — captures most vividly the exuberance of John Held, Jr.’s magazine covers, the ones depicting flappers and swells and practitioners of the Charleston. When not edging his way across a skyscraper ledge or contending with the component parts of a precariously situated clock in "Safety Last," Lloyd’s determination to succeed embodied the zip and bounce we associate with the Jazz Age.

"Introducing the art form to new people is so gratifying," says Dennis Wolkowiczof the Film Society. "And pretty soon first-timers become regulars."

"Ben-Hur" (1925).

Through Aug. 27 the 90-year-old Portage Theater in Portage Park will play host to a variety of stars and genres. Never seen the Francis X. Bushman edition of "Ben-Hur," like "The Freshman" a 1925 artifact? This is the time and place. Familiar only with the Antonio Banderas portrayal of Zorro? Try "The Mark of Zorro" featuring Douglas Fairbanks, which will be accompanied by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra in its Aug. 6 Film Society screening.

"The Penalty" (1920).

Want to scar your kid’s psyche for life? Well, have you ever seen the 1920 Lon Chaney film "The Penalty," in which the endlessly transformative star plays a double amputee out for revenge? Wait until Aug. 13 to see it on a big screen. (The headline over the original review in the Sept. 15, 1920, Chicago Daily Tribune, commemorating the melodrama’s downtown engagement before playing the Portage: "Worth Seeing, but

Not Worth Eighty-three Cents.")

The West End Jazz Band will grace the festival’s opening and closing nights. The Portage is at 4050 N. Milwaukee Ave.; click here for complete list of films. The Portage Theater information number is 773-205-7372.

More cellu-Lloyd

And speaking of Harold Lloyd: The Music Box Theatre goes with the horn-rims at 11:30 a.m. July 31 and Aug. 1 for a bill of five Lloyd shorts, dating from 1919 ("Billy Blazes") to 1921 ("Never Weaken"). 11:30 a.m. next Saturday and Sunday. The Music Box is located at 3733 N. Southport Ave.; 773-871-6604.

"My humor was never cruel or cynical," Lloyd said in 1970. "I just took life and poked fun at it. We made it so it could be understood the world over, without language barriers. We seem to have conquered the time barrier, too."

July 01, 2010

A valley far from green: "Restrepo," co-directed by Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger.

The fine, fierce new documentary "Restrepo" tracks a year in the lives of a 15-man U.S. Army platoon under fire in the Taliban-ridden Korengal Valley of eastern Afghanistan, near the Pakistan border. It's hard to imagine a less agenda-driven filmic experience than that of these soldiers' daily lives. The film takes its name from a platoon medic we meet at the beginning, whose fate provides the picture with its narrative spine.

It is one of those pictures that simply works, for conservatives, liberals, centrists — nearly everyone, I imagine, who doesn't require a thesis statement of intent or finger-wagging. If people take the chance and forgo "Eclipse" or "Toy Story 3" for another week, they will be gripped.

"We made a war documentary during a recession. It's about the stupidest thing you can do." Froggy-voiced, seated at one end of a long conference table in a room at the Union League Club, journalist, author and fledgling filmmaker Sebastian Junger, in town earlier this week, acknowledged the risks he took getting this film made. (His fellow producer, cinematographer and director on "Restrepo" is Tim Hetherington," below right, with Junger.) "Had we not sold it to National Geographic," he says of the self-financed venture (which included a year to edit 190 hours down to 94 minutes), "it would've been a financial catastrophe for both of us."

The larger terrors were not simply financial. Early on, with the camera running, we're jammed inside a Humvee with Junger and the men with whom he's embedded. Suddenly a fertilizer bomb goes off underneath the vehicle. It's a startling moment; no one was hurt, but as Junger says, "the dread, the anxiety" of waiting for the next IED or sniper fire takes a heavy toll.

"One of the guys out there, (Sgt.) Brendan O'Byrne, said to me: ‘Some of the scariest stuff out there never happens.'"

Together or separately Junger and Hetherington spent five one-month tours of duty in 2007 and 2008 embedded with Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, much of that time living at a vulnerable outpost named after the fallen medic of the title. Junger, who was covering the war for Vanity Fair and ABC News while shooting video, expanded the Vanity Fair articles into a book titled "War," just out.

The film, picked up for distribution by National Geographic Entertainment after its Grand Jury Prize-winning premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, arrives in limited release in theaters not long after Gen. Stanley McChrystal — until recently the leading U.S. military commander in Afghanistan — got bounced for speaking ill of the Obama administration and the Afghanistan war to a reporter from Rolling Stone.

The brass Junger has met, he says, "are all really smart and generally careful, but they're also exhausted and frustrated." Afghanistan, he says, "has been in agony for 20 years. … If only the Bush administration leaned on Pakistan, instead of turning a blind eye. Had they put more than 15,000 troops in Afghanistan after the Taliban collapsed. … I mean, there are 40,000 cops in New York City. What were they thinking? They were thinking Iraq, is what they were thinking.

"We had worldwide political and moral support for the war in Afghanistan. And they blew it."

But as Junger points out, according to Human Rights Watch figures, 16,000 Afghans have died in combat-related operations in the early 21st century. During the previous decade of the 1990s, under the Taliban, 400,000 Afghans died.

"This is the lowest level of violence in that country in 30 years," he says. "So it becomes a very confusing conversation if you try to reject the current war on humanitarian grounds."

"Restrepo" does not examine foreign or military policy. It is a procedural. While your own response to it will not be free of politics — no one's could be, really — you will come away with a renewed respect for those who choose to fight in a hellaciously dangerous part of the world.

For Junger, hearing the postproduction response from the men interviewed in the film, after he and Hetherington showed them a rough cut, meant everything. "They loved it," he says. "And their wives loved it. That was very gratifying."

The film opens today at AMC Pipers Alley and Cinemark Evanston; next week it'll also be shown at the AMC Cantera 30.

June 25, 2010

So said Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, whose paradoxically enchanting urban poem, "Man With the Movie Camera" (1929), is excerpted in "Visionaries," an engaging documentary surveying the history and key players of the experimental cinema movement.

The full title — "Visionaries: Jonas Mekas and the (Mostly) American Avant-Garde" —indicates the real subject of the film, the influential critic and filmmaker who was scheduled to pick up a lifetime achievement award at the Chicago Underground Film Festival this weekend. Mekas, 87, unfortunately is "stuck in Europe," a CUFF representative relayed Thursday. But the weeklong IFP/Chicago-sponsored festival, continuing through Thursday at the downtown Gene Siskel Film Center, will either Skype him in for an interview, or present a Mekas-created video created for the event.

No underground film festival could pay tribute to a more deserving man with a movie camera (a Bolex more often than not, in the old days). And while director Chuck Workman's "Visionaries," which screens at 8:15 p.m. Friday, may be wider than it is deep, it's an eyeful of a way to get to know Mekas, the primary force behind New York's Anthology Film Archives. Through his advocacy and passion and love, he became to a significant chunk of our off-road film heritage what Henri Langlois was to the Cinematheque Francaise.

This is the 17th edition of CUFF, and programmer and artistic director Bryan Wendorf's slate includes a Mekas program of short films ("Life Is Unpredictable," at 4:45 p.m. on Saturday) in addition to various world, regional and Chicago premieres.

From "Putty Hill," a Phoenix-like success story that rose from the ashes of another project.

The story behind its making: Last summer, Porterfield was in the midst of feature project that fell apart. In a rush he put together an outline for a drama about a funeral of a Baltimore junkie, and the friends and family gathering for the occasion. He shot it, improvising with his cast, in less than two weeks.

Off-screen, behind the camera, we hear a voice asking questions of the people we're following. This documentary trope, anchoring a fictional film, has been used before and will be used again, but "Putty Hill" finesses it shrewdly. The camera reveals the crisscrossing activity of a skate park (shades of Gus Van Sant), karaoke laments at a funeral wake and, memorably, an ex-con tattoo artist at work.

The startling thing about "Putty Hill" is its visual assurance: While falsely glamorizing some pretty tough lives, cinematographer Jeremy Saulnier uses color and light with the judgment of a master.

The complete CUFF schedule is here. The Siskel Film Center is at 164 N. State St.

June 18, 2010

Fifty years ago, Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" opened in Paris, where Godard shot it, pell-mell, the year before. In a single, seemingly improvised stroke he changed the language, tone and attitude of modern film, honoring the medium's B-movie crime sprees of the past (Godard dedicated his debut feature to Monogram Pictures, the Poverty Row studio that fed his young cinephiliac imagination) by telling a story of a man, a woman, a gun and a betrayal. Yet he told it in such a way as to sideline the usual narrative concerns.

"Breathless" is pure sensation, pure romantic fatalism. It's a send-up, a kiss-off and, paradoxically, wholly sincere in its embrace of living dangerously. It is also the crucial early title in the Nouvelle Vague, the French New Wave. Francois Truffaut, who wrote the story Godard then stripped for parts, had announced his arrival a year earlier with his own semi-autobiographical film "The 400 Blows." It's wonderful. But "Breathless," no less personal and far more experimental, remains both wonderful and avant.

The film has returned in a fabulous new black-and-white print opening Friday at the Music Box Theatre. I hadn't seen it in years, and not in a decent presentation since my 20s, which may be the optimum first-encounter age for this brilliant provocation.

"I wanted to see if I'd be glad to see you again," Jean-Paul Belmondo's car thief says to the American (Jean Seberg) selling New York Herald Tribunes on the streets of Paris. Turns out I was dying to see "Breathless" again, and didn't even know it. Since last week I haven't been able to get composer Martial Solal's music out of my head. Lush, violin-intensive romanticism one minute, cool-school bebop the next (with an indelible 12-note "danger" motif), it flits in and out of the scenes in a way musical scoring never had before and rarely has since.

Richard Brody's excellent study of Godard, "Everything is Cinema," notes that the first-draft version of the movie ran two-and-a-half hours. Nothing unusual there; first cuts often come in an hour longer than their eventual release versions. According to Godard's fellow filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville (who appears in "Breathless" as a blase novelist), "instead of cutting whole scenes as was the practice then, [Godard] had the brilliant idea of cutting more or less at random within scenes. The result was excellent."

Brody rightly takes exception to the choice of the word "random"; he argues that Godard simply wasn't compelled by the conventional story beats and dramatic peaks and valleys. The moments between the usual moments interested him more. Shot like a documentary, decades before the faux-documentary visual technique became a nagging cliche, "Breathless" became a story of a glamorous bum on the lam tucked inside a movie that, in effect, was also on the lam.

Director Steven Spielberg, between takes with Bruce the mechanical shark, in "Jaws."

Elsewhere on the pulp spectrum, 15 years down the line from "Breathless," you'll find a movie starring a mechanical shark that didn't look particularly scary to many of the people who worked on the film in question.

The movie was "Jaws," which opened 35 years ago this weekend. Director Steven Spielberg's monster takes a lot of flak these days for marking the beginning of the end — for being the summer blockbuster that commodified Hollywood product and turned the whole season into a pre-sold junkyard of metallic nonsense.

Well. It's also terrific, so that complicates things. What we can say about "Jaws" is this: Yes, it opened everywhere at once, and this was new. No slow build, from big cities to small towns. Everywhere. And everybody went, and screamed, and laughed, and screamed some more.

The marketing phenomenon of "Jaws" fascinates, and was hugely influential — two summers later "Star Wars" worked the same mass-market magic, only more profitably. Yet "Star Wars" doesn't hold the same interest or cinematic exuberance for me today. I believe Spielberg's shark movie, the finest kind of pulp, remains one of his two or three masterworks. It's a machine, no less than the fake-finned adversary periodically seen in full-view on screen, but a glorious one.

Why is it a classic? Because you remember the people in it, that's why. Reductive reasoning, but I think it holds. You remember those three personalities on that boat.

It is also a patient film. We forget this. True, it begins with a moon-lit shark attack, and a hell of a scary one. But the script (wisely pared down from Peter Benchley's novel) spaces out its scare sequences, intertwining dread with insidious, teasing wit. Spielberg never delivered a more effective one-two in his career than the shot of Roy Scheider, tossing chum over the side, followed by his reaction to what has just surfaced for his close-up (above). Call it a sight gag, but it occasioned one of the greatest screams followed by one of the greatest laughs I've ever heard in a theater.

January 21, 2010

A word from the management in director H.C. Potter's "Hellzapoppin'" (1941).

A generous helping of miracles graced the movie year 1941, “Citizen Kane,”“The Maltese Falcon” and “The Lady Eve” among them. But what are the odds that the same year produced the W.C. Fields vehicle “Never Give a Sucker an Even Break” along with a comedy even more maniacally unstable?

I’m talkin’ about “Hellzapoppin’,” director H.C. Potter’s one-of-a-kind oddity, adapting the Broadway revue headlined, in both mediums, by the vaudeville team of Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson (below).

It follows no known formula, or rules of narrative engagement. It is a screwball nervous breakdown. And if you have never seen its justly famous jitterbug sequence, well, it is fantastic — fantastic enough to transcend its racial stereotypes and let the performers have the last word with every new Lindy Hop explosion.

A rare bird on the exhibition circuit, “Hellzapoppin’” will be shown at 8 p.m. Saturday at Bank of America Cinema, 4901 W. Irving Park Rd. Road in Portage Park. $5. $3 for seniors and kids. Popcorn, candy and soda, $1.

What are these, 1941 prices?

Movies on the radio: Michael Phillips chats with Greg Jarrett in the 6:30 a.m. hour Friday on WGN-AM 720.

And on TV: Phillips co-hosts “At the Movies” with A.O. Scott, airing 10:35 p.m. (after late local news) Saturdays and 10:30 a.m. Sundays on WLS-Ch. 7.

November 10, 2009

For nearly a century "Zepped," a 6-minute 1916 film of mysterious pedigree starring Charlie Chaplin, was lost. Now it’s found.

Earlier this year, an Essex, England, film collector named Morace Park made a successful eBay bid of £3.20 (or $5.68 American) on a nitrate film canister containing unlabeled footage. The footage turned out to be the obscure Chaplin short, a World War I propaganda effort designed to buck up British morale, combining stop-motion animation and outtakes and unused alternate shots from films Chaplin made for both Keystone and Essanay studios

The hybrid, over which Chaplin apparently exercised no creative control, includes a shot or two from "His New Job," the short film Chaplin made for the Chicago-based Essanay during his 23-day residency here in late 1914 and early 1915.

"It’s very interesting stuff," said David Kiehn, manager and historian of the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum of Fremont, Calif. Chaplin expert Kiehn saw portions of the film last week.

Park and business partner John Dyer went public with their discovery Nov. 1. The Chaplin short’s considerable historical interest will be the subject of a self-financed documentary.

"Zepped" begins with an animated version of Chaplin dreaming of leaving America to fight the Germans back home in England. In one animated segment the Kaiser emerges from a German sausage. In what appears to be newsreel-type footage, according to Kiehn, a genuine and eerily low-flying Zeppelin is seen hovering over London during a wartime attack.

The movie contrives to make Chaplin — under fire at the time for his lack of participation in the war effort — the hero of the hour. A 1916 Manchester newspaper account reported that the ending depicts "the Zeppelin in flames and the gallant Charlie running away."

Kiehn speculated that the cobbled-together Chaplin outtakes may have been assembled and augmented with animation in London under the supervision of Harry Spoor, who ran the London office of Chicago-based Essanay, co-founded by his brother, George K. Spoor. Other suggest that "Zepped" was put together in another country altogether, albeit one under British rule at the time: The surviving nitrate print of the film carries an Egyptian censors' certificate.

Even if "Zepped" turns out to be something less than "THE cinematic find of the last 100 years," as Park and company touted on their web site, it’s better off than was reported three years ago in a Russian film journal. "The film has not survived," the magazine stated.

November 05, 2009

Alongside the felt-free Alain Resnais retrospective, this month the Gene Siskel Film Center is re-running a substantial portion of “Muppets, Music & Magic: Jim Henson’s Legacy,” which was a significant popular success last year for the State Street cinematheque.

The Muppets survey ranges from feature-length offerings to a program of Henson’s shorts and commercials. Of particular interest is “Muppets History 201” — the “101” survey played the Film Center last fall — which reminds us just how far back Henson’s marionette/puppet hybrids go on the pop culture timeline.

“Muppets” and “Eisenhower years” don’t seem to go together, somehow. I always associated the Muppets with “Sesame Street,” of which I was an enormous fan. But the year I was born, 1961, Dave Garroway brought Jim and Jane Henson and their creations onto “The Today Show.” By that time they’d already made a name for themselves on “Sam and Friends,” which aired in the Washington, D.C. area beginning in 1955.

The Muppets were regulars on “The Jimmy Dean Show” in the early ‘60s. They did 25 guest spots on Ed Sullivan. They entertained Jack Paar and Dick Cavett. And once they helped make “Sesame Street” and got their own show and became movie stars, they were everywhere, from commercials to Car son’s couch. Kermit the Frog even guest-hosted “The Tonight Show” once.

There was a twee side to some of their entertainment legacy. But what’s remarkable about Henson’s characters is, in the main, their genuine not-sticky-sweetness. They’re just sweet enough, really. Henson and his longtime collaborator (and later, film director) Frank Oz were fantastically complementary talents. Think of how magically right “Sesame Street’s” Ernie and Bert were as a couple, no matter how often Bert (to whom SpongeBob’s Squidward owes everything) broke down into neurotic despair over some playful provocation. Henson’s voice as Kermit is one of the great, grin-inducing vocal characterizations in the history of American show business.

A generation after “Sesame Street,” long after Henson’s 1990 death at age 53 of streptococcus pneumonia, the Jim Henson Company and the Disney Channel teamed up for a series called “Bear in the Big Blue House.” I loved that show: It was our son’s favorite when he was very young, and compared to the squalling aggravations that pass for pre-teen amusements now, it was like a spiritual retreat. Hen son was a gentle soul (though some of his slapstick, particularly in some of his TV commercials, bordered on the sadistic). Mainly he knew how to make people laugh, and create characters who, like Kermit, changed with the decades but never tried to keep up with the times.

Movies on the radio: Michael Phillips chats with Greg Jarrett in the 6:30 a.m. hour Friday on WGN-AM 720.And on TV: Phillips co-hosts “At the Movies” with A.O. Scott, airing after late local news Saturdays and 11 a.m. Sundays on WLS-Ch. 7.

Mariah Carey and Gabourey Sidibe in "Precious." (Courtesy of Lionsgate)

The first 20 minutes of “Precious,” the full title of which is “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire,” are so intense and pitched so high, you may not feel like sticking it out. My advice: Stick it out. This is an exceptional film about nearly unendurable circumstances, endured. You will come out the other side of it a markedly enriched filmgoer.

The story of Claireece “Precious” Jones” tells of a New York City teenager living in 1980s Harlem, raped by her barely glimpsed father, abused by her unfathomably cruel mother. Precious is illiterate but bright, and against her mother’s wishes she switches to an alternative school where, in a literacy workshop, she comes under the life-saving tutelage of Ms. Rain (Paula Patton). The 16-year-old Precious has one child and another on the way, both by her own father. Her life (and director Lee Daniels’ wrenching film) becomes a mosaic of pain and promise, sunny skies and grief, with enough of an emotional impact to put a dent in the most jaded audience.

The novel was published in 1996. Screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher has toned down some of the miseries inflicted on Precious, but this is no whitewash on the order of the film version of “The Color Purple” (a book referenced directly in Sapphire’s original). It is true to its source, and only in the coda do we feel as if we’re getting more affirmation than the protagonist’s narrative circumstances support. The film is rough around the edges but fantastically well-acted, and truly alive.

The miracle of the ensemble is that it does, in fact, feel like an ensemble. Newcomer Gabourey Sidibe plays Precious, and she is phenomenally expressive in her portrayal of a huge young woman shouldering a massive amount of adversity. Mo’Nique plays the pivotal role of Precious’ vicious mother — Ronald Reagan’s nightmare vision of a “welfare queen” come to life. Some have claimed this portrayal comes too close to minstrelsy for comfort. God knows Mo’Nique is asked to do some pretty horrible things, but “Precious” keeps this character just this side of cardboard monstrosity. There’ll be an Oscar nomination or two in this film’s near future.

And Mariah Carey — who knew the pop diva had such a good, honest, clean performance in her? She plays a social worker, and in a couple of lengthy interactions, Carey and Sidibe find common performance ground where you wouldn’t think any existed.

Daniels allows himself the fantasy outlet of Precious’ imagination: When the sexual violence (or other kinds of violence) gets to be too much, the young woman escapes into herself and we see her on-screen as she dreams herself to be: all dolled up on the fashion runway, or attending some paparazzi-laden premiere. Some of the visualizations are conventionally realized, but the necessity of such scenes is clear. Still, “Precious” is at its best when it spends time in the classroom, and when we get to know a host of tough, smart characters on their own terms. These sequences rival those in the recent French film “The Class.” We root for these survivors, not because they’re being set up as rooting interests by the filmmakers, but because their back-and-forth is so sharp and vivid and dynamic. These supporting characters keep the movie hopping. It’s not an easy film to watch. But neither, for many reasons, is “Precious” easy to forget.

The new comedy “(Untitled)” has the punctuation and the thinness of a gallery wall label. It wanders the exhibition spaces, lofts and performance venues of Chelsea and other parts of Manhattan, eavesdropping on the narcissistic mutterings — funny, some of them, now and then — of a group of artists and bohemians and poseurs going up, or down, or sideways.

The script by Jonathan Parker and Catherine di Napoli, which Parker directed, is a tale of two brothers. Adrian, played by Adam Goldberg, devotes his sour life to music so forbiddingly atonal, he believes that harmony was “a capitalist plot to sell pianos.” Brother Josh, played with a bland air of superiority by Eion Bailey, is the opposite: no standards, no artistic fire in the belly, but lots of money in the bank. His paintings decorate countless hotel lobby walls, and Madeline, his rep, played by Marley Shelton, likes to keep his stuff “in back,” where the swells visiting her gallery for its more adventurous offerings will never see it.

Both brothers have a yen for Madeline, who, in one of the film’s few successful running gags, is always wearing clothing made of vinyl or squeaky leather or excessive zipper components. She’s not a sight gag; she’s a sound gag. I wish the movie had more sly jabs up its sleeve. Too much of the time we’re stuck on repeat, as we listen to different characters pull variations on the theme of insecure narcissism. In one scene, Adrian unleashes his preferred brand of atonal angst on a restaurant audience. In another, Madeline’s hot-hot-hot installation artist, played by Vinnie Jones, explains that he’s not influenced by the past, he’s influencing the past.

A surer hand behind the camera might’ve finessed the jokes more effectively, or established a consistent and satisfying tone. Playwrights as diverse as Donald Margulies, Tina Howe and James Lapine have dissected characters such as these before, and better. “(Untitled)” has too much repetition, not enough variation.

The women fare best, and if it weren’t for the British actress Lucy Punch, very droll as Adrian’s game but long-suffering clarinet player, the movie would have no contrast of any kind, nothing to vary its jargon-mad game.

About this blog

Conversations about film, the bad and the beautiful. Your host is Michael Phillips, who was born in the year of "The Hustler," "La Notte" and "Flower Drum Song." Looking for Michael Phillips' movie reviews? Find them at chicagotribune.com/movies

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